“Yup. Like I said, that’s Ruby.”
“Did she even ask if you wanted to go?” my stepmom said, pushing.
(She hadn’t.)
“Didn’t she think there was a reason you came to live with us in the first place?”
(There was . . . but what was it?)
“And why now? Why today?”
(I hadn’t asked Ruby that, either.)
“Chloe?”
Ruby wasn’t here to tell me what to say or remind me of what I wanted. Maybe she should have coached me before going in to talk to my dad.
All I knew is she’d landed in Pennsylvania so suddenly—appearing in my camper, hoodie sweatshirt on over summer negligee, a new freckle I didn’t recognize on her nose, the pink sunglasses I’d stolen and she’d stolen back perched on her forehead, standing there sucking down the bottle of tropical fruit punch she’d found in my minifridge—and I hadn’t had a chance to decide how I felt about it.
If I wanted to go with her.
If I was allowed to go, if I even would.
But, before I had a chance to answer, Ruby emerged from my dad’s office. This was down in the basement of the house, wood-paneled and lit with dim, dull bulbs so it looked like we were lost in an alien forest, walled in on all sides by flattened trees.
She walked out and stood before me and my stepmom near the jaundice-colored couch. She didn’t sit. It wasn’t the kind of couch she’d ever sit on.
From the cloudy expression on her face, I knew it hadn’t gone well. She seemed . . . there was no other word to call it but surprised. He must have said no, which didn’t happen to her often. She probably had no clue what to make of it.
One time, I remember, a boy she was sort of seeing tried to say no when she told him she was craving a slice of cheesecake and he needed to go get her some, like right this minute. “Where’s the best cheesecake in the whole state?” she’d asked him, and when he’d said down in the city, she’d said, well, that’s where he needed to go. She was testing him, I knew, doing it only because she could. But he had to work early the next morning, he said. It was late, he said, too late to drive two-and-a-half hours to the city just for cheesecake and two-and-a-half hours back so he could make it to work on time, especially if she wasn’t going to ride with him.
She gave him the eyes first: green in the way nothing else in the world is green, green to stun you, venom green.
She moved closer to him on the couch, lowered the volume on the TV. Then she took a single finger, just the one, and traced the line of his chin—accomplishing two things at once: a reminder that he really should do something about that stubble, but also of who he was dealing with, who she was.
“Don’t you like cheesecake?” she asked him innocently, and I’m trying to remember if his name was Raf or Ralph or Ray, because then Raf or Ralph or Ray said, “You know I do,” and she said, “Do I really?”
She leaned on his shoulder and mumbled something into his ear that I couldn’t make out from across the room.
She’d had him at the chin, I could tell, but she’d also made him late to work a few times already and I knew he had that on his mind, too. Being fired was apparently something that normal people concerned themselves with. Ruby herself was always late for work at Cumby’s. She ate M&M’s free off the vine in the candy aisle and popped the cap on her gas tank to keep her car full up on unleaded, but she wasn’t fired, not even close. Then again, no one else in town lived a life like Ruby’s.
Raf or Ralph or Ray was trying to make a decision. Then he saw me looking.